Andrew Welch said:
> Each has its own advantages/drawbacks. Personally I like the first
> technique, although it can get cluttered when there are 10+ items.
>
> Are there any better ways that I'm missing?
But do you actually need to make a choice?
Why not allow both inline and referenced? That way you can have clean
nesting for simple cases and flatter files for more complicated reasons.
The code you add to handle the second case may be made up elsewhere, for
example because it might be easier to generate the XML from arbtirary
input in the first place.
(Answer: is it that we don't allow multiple forms of markup not because
there would a couple of extra lines of programming to handle the
reference, but because we are habituated against this kind of choice
because our schema languages don't support choices between references and
containers very well?)
Cheers
Rick Jelliffe